by SASKATCHEWAN KOLONOSCOGRAD, Alternate Reality News Service Existentialism Writer
The city of Tenquok, a three hour drive from Chengdo deep in the Chinese interior, is a ghost town. Walking the dusty streets, you can almost imagine Clint Eastwood staring down Lee van Cleef in front of a sign in Mandarin characters hawking "the best chicken neck soup in southeast China!"
That's not what makes Tenquok remarkable. For the last 34 years of the city's existence, it was populated entirely by men.
"Imagine it!" enthused Li "Mary" Shong-Peng. "A place where men could be men, free from the influence of women! Here, we can see masculinity in its purest form! If studying this town doesn't get me tenure, I'll become a Latvian monkey herder!"
"Ooh, that so crazy!" Quik "Harry" Piq-Niq, affecting an outrageous Chinese accent despite my best efforts to get him to speak normally, responded. "Tenquok stupid experiment in social engineering! Very very bad! You all go away and leave city to turn to dust, now, okay?"
Quik, a former resident of Tenquok, now a door to door rickshaw repair kit salesman in Chengdo, clearly does not have fond memories of the city in which he grew up. "Me like girls," he said. "You introduce me to cute anthropologist girl, yes?"
"As if," Li responded.
How did Tenquok become a city of men? A combination of China's one child rule and the use of selective abortions to ensure that that child was male. After all of the women either died or moved away, the only citizens who were left were men.
"Of course, they could only survive for a single generation," Li allowed, "after which those who hadn't moved away all died out. Still, they left behind a monument that will be studied for decades!"
Li gave me a tour of one of the homes in Tenquok. It was dusty, even though its owner had only died a year before. Rats scurried about freely, picking at a pile of pizza boxes in a corner. In another part of the room was a stack of old TV Guides, odd considering there was no sign of a television set. Japanese housewife porn was poorly hidden under the bed, a stack of empty beer cans nearby. Underwear still hung on a line in the bathroom.
Li took a deep breath. "You can just smell the testosterone, can't you?"
I could certainly smell something - I had to run from the house to retch in the street.
Although the majority of homes in the area looked like frat houses from bad Hollywood comedies from the 70s, approximately one in seven houses was immaculate. "These houses helped protect the people in the city from the spread of disease," Li explained. "A clean house would be inhospitable to carriers of disease, creating a barrier that limited it to a small part of the population. It really is a brilliant feat of social engineering!"
Or, the men living in the clean houses could have just been gay.
"Oh, no," Li said, her eyes widening in surprise. "There are no gay people in China. It's the law."
Bulwark against disease it is, then. Perhaps they had the Felix Unger gene.
A small tent city of anthropologists, sociologists and Greek hair stylists has arisen just outside Tenquok. "The city is a unique site for study," explained Martin "Grok-Lin" Schmetterling, an anthropologist of sociology who is studying those who are studying the masculine culture of Tenquok. "You can understand why hundreds of anthropologists and sociologists would descend on the city to study it."
And, the Greek hair stylists? "What?" Schmetterling asked, "Anthropologists and sociologists can't look good while working?"
Point taken.
Like locusts, all of the people studying Tenquok threaten to strip the city bare and leave nothing but footprints in dust and second-hand memories. "That's where the story gets really fascinating," Schmetterling said. "A democratic structure emerged among the scholars and stylists outside of Tenquok. Minutes were taken. Votes were conducted. They worked out a schedule so that only a handful of them were in the city at any one time - they hoped this would preserve the site for future generations of scholars.
"Of course, they immediately started cheating - many snuck into the city when it wasn't their turn. I expect Tenquok will have completely disappeared by next Tuesday. Still, nobody said ad hoc democratic structures that arose to meet local conditions were perfect!"
Robert Downey Jr. has expressed an interest in playing a chicken neck farmer who is the last person to leave Tenquok. However, former residents of the city are not necessarily happy about their lives getting the Hollywood treatment.
"Somebody should build dam upriver," Quik bitterly stated, "and put city out of misery!"